Todd Jaquith opines that the transition from one year to the next is always a little uncertain, an uneasy blend of anxiety and optimism, it is also a time of retrospection, introspection, and even a little tentative prognostication. And since the latter is our stock-in-trade at Futurism, we believe now is the perfect time to look ahead at what 2017 has in store for us.
2016 was a remarkable year for space, full of notable firsts and spectacular discoveries. The year opened with a bang (quite literally) when LIGO confirmed the first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, and it took off from there, SpaceX landed a reusable booster on an oceangoing droneship, an Earth-sized planet was finally confirmed to orbit the nearest star, the OSIRIS-REx probe was dispatched to sample an asteroid, and Stephen Hawking announced he wants to send tiny spacecraft to the stars.
Virgin Galactic is still looking to get back in the game after its SpaceShipTwo fatally broke apart over the Mojave Desert in 2014, and one of its other ventures, a commercial supersonic transporter, is slated to begin prototype testing in late 2017. Meanwhile, Bezos Blue Origin is still on track to begin launching test astronauts before the year end. And that is a big deal, because it would mean the private space companies have graduated from launching inert payloads of expensive electronics to finally lofting delicate packages of fragile human flesh, perhaps the most expensive resource we have.
Look for space infrastructure to rapidly grow in 2017. These are the little, less-heralded things that end up having major consequences. NASA (tentatively) expects to launch its Deep Space Atomic Clock technology demonstrator by the end of the year, which aims to improve the navigation of intra-Solar System spacecraft by orders of magnitude; and those in the know are betting big on the kickoff of OneWeb dream of a globally available, space-based internet.
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